Artist Talks

Trimpin is a Seattle, Washington-based kinetic sculptor, sound artist, and musician. Trimpin's work integrates sculpture and sound across a variety of media including fixed installation and live music, theater, and dance performance. His works are known to be electromechanically actuated by embedded microcontrollers that communicate MIDI. Trimpin is a recipient of numerous honors. In 1994, he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Trimpin was also the recipient of a 1997 MacArthur 'Genius' Award. He is the subject of Peter Esmonde's documentary film 'Trimpin: The Sound of Invention', featuring music by the Kronos Quartet. In May 2010, he was the honorary recipient of a Doctor of Musical Arts from California Institute of the Arts. Since Fall 2010, Trimpin has been working with students and faculty at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) to create the multimedia installation 'The Gurs Zyklus', in collaboration with composer/director/performer Rinde Eckert.

What does fashion lack? “Microcontrollers” according to Dutch based fashion-tech designer and innovator Anouk Wipprecht. She is working in the emerging field of “fashion-tech”; a rare combination with engineering, science and interaction/user experience design. She has created an impressive body of tech-enhanced designs bringing together fashion and technology in unconventional ways. She creates technological couture; with systems around the body that tend towards artificial intelligences; projected as “host” systems on the body, her designs move, breathe, and react to the environment around them.

Transforming the Poetic Experience of Space through Light investigates theoretical and practical artistic methods of manipulating senses through which the space is experienced cognitively and emotionally. The focus is on innovative use of experimental lighting that engages perception, emotion, memory, and imagination. Theoretical research focuses on historical and contemporary references that demonstrate transformation of spatial experience by means of manipulating light. Studying theoretical and practical examples leads towards discovering, interpreting, and developing a novel body of knowledge for enhancing the multisensory spatial experience that provides access to transforming the perception of space in the purpose of art.

Practice based research investigates both traditional and progressive principles of spatial design, fabrication, lighting design, audiovisual systems, and algorithmic composition. The interest is in exploiting technological advancements in lighting that can fuse perception of senses and add to the phenomenological experience of the artistic intentions. The premise for this practice is an expansion of the lighting technology apparatus into immersive perceptual hyperspace.

Artist in Residence James George finds similarities between the creative process and the pursuit of research. 'Before this residency,' George says, 'I had not been aware of the extent and makeup of the peer-review process in research, but there's another analogy to art: Both are based on interacting with a community that shares a similar goal or similar ideas, and each person makes a unique contribution.'

We present CLOUDS, an upcoming documentary featuring new media artists in conversation about computational art and visual technology. The film contains interviews with over thirty international leaders in the field, captured using a Kinect paired to a DSLR video camera. Rendered in a realtime environment, CLOUDS depicts the artists as computational forms coexisting with their creations and engaging in an infinite conversation. The viewer navigates the virtual space following topics of interest and choosing who to watch. The film has been developed using our RGBDToolkit software, an application and code library for depth-enabled filmmaking. Using computer vision techniques to rectify the Kinect’s depth image to a high definition RGB video stream, the toolkit visualizes the combined data as a textured mesh. The scene may be re-photographed from new angles using a virtual camera, offering potential for new cinematic techniques that take advantage of this CGI and video hybrid.

To a great extent, the language we think in defines what we can know. Thus for all the strengths of words, there are aspects of understanding that remain outside their reach. Through a dissertation written and drawn entirely in the comic book medium, I put forth a challenge to the long-held tradition of verbal-linguistic dominance as the legitimate form of scholarship and seek to expand the forms that academic inquiry can take. By taking this “amphibious” approach, that is integrating visual alongside verbal, I confront the limitations inherent to any single mode and in the process explore new possibilities for understanding. The dissertation’s very form embodies its central premise that we make meaning in a range of ways beyond solely the verbal. Specifically, I attend to the importance of visual thinking in teaching and learning, and the work itself becomes a demonstration for how comics can be a powerful tool for thought and serious inquiry.

Comics hold the potential to present complex and difficult information with great clarity without simplifying or omitting concepts – if anything, the form’s inherent multiplicity allows for the inclusion of more layers of information than text alone. Through this work, I want not only to push on the boundaries of what is considered scholarly but also to extend the boundaries of who is included in the conversation and create something that is ultimately accessible to a wider public.

This talk considers some histories of arts-driven innovation in and out of computer research laboratories. Through artist residencies, 'renaissance teams', and other multidisciplinary innovation methods, high-technology research laboratories have knowingly (and sometimes unknowingly) engaged with new-media artists for nearly fifty years, yielding meaningful dividends in both culture and technology. The first generation of computer artists, in the 1960s, were wholly dependent on such labs for access; most recently, however, the growth of personal computing power and rapidly-expanding cultures of commons-based peer-production have allowed loose, self-assembling networks of artist-hackers to innovate quickly outside the laboratory. The presentation includes a discussion about how commercial research labs might better harness the energies of this expanded talent pool, while returning value to these communities in ways they find meaningful.

Levin's presentation is framed by a brief discussion of his own computational and new-media artworks, with attention to how the use of speculative gestural interfaces can support new modes of critical inquiry, interaction and play. His presentation concludes with an update from his laboratory at Carnegie Mellon, and its recent initiatives in real-time robotic arts, social and tactical media, Kinect-based cinema, and biological art

The Electric Sheep is an infinite animation created by the collective intelligence of 450,000 computers and people. It is an artificial life-form based on a combination of mathematics, genetic algorithms, crowdsource, and open source. This talk will review the mechanism and purpose of the Electric Sheep project, as well as its history and related software artworks by Scott Draves. Along the way we will address questions such as: Can a finite program produce an infinite artwork? Can computers be truly creative, or do they merely recombine what is fed to them? What is the essence of life, and can it be reproduced in digital form? What is the relationship between man and machine?